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Saturday, June 22, 2013

Our lives on our
permaculture smallholding here in Brittany would not be possible, economically
or physically, without the help of volunteers. Some come to stay for just a
week (our standard invite) some volunteers have become friends and come back
for more and we have friends and even holidaymakers in our gite who’ve
become volunteers, we’re grateful to all of them.

Willing pairs of hands are
always welcome and some volunteers also bring other skills to the party. Four
such talented people recently helped us to replace the rotting doors on our
barn-renovation-into-a-new-gîte project. We have one pair of big sliding doors
and a pair that open on hinges. The latter had rotted at the bottom, with holes
big enough for cats to enter; the former had been stitched and patched many
times before and seemed only to be held together by hope.Les offres de coups de
main sont toujours les bienvenues et certains bénévoles apportent aussi de
nouvelles compétences. Quatre de ces personnes talentueuses nous ont récemment
aidé à remplacer les portes fatiguées d’une grange que nous rénovons pour en
faire un deuxième gîte. Nous avions ainsi une paire de grandes portes
coulissantes et une autre paire sur charnières. Elles étaient pourries à la
base, avec des trous assez grands pour que les chats puissent entrer ! Les
premières ont été « rapiécées » à plusieurs reprises et semblaient
tenir seulement par miracle.

Andrew, who, with his wife
Sue, volunteered a few winters ago, keeps coming back for more. A trained
architect and a dab hand with CAD, after taking a few measurements, Andrew sat
down one evening with his computer and produced a set of drawings of a pair of
sliding barn doors.

Paul and Madeleine are
friends from Brighton and, when they came to visit, took pity on us with the
amount of projects and other tasks we have to do on our permaculture
smallholding. They proposed coming out for a couple of weeks in early spring
with their son Max, simply asking that we have a list of jobs ready for them.
Paul and Max are both experienced carpenter/joiners, so I emailed them Andrew’s
drawings.Paul et Madeleine, des
amis de Brighton (notre ancienne ville en Angleterre), sont venus nous visiter
et ont pris pitié de nous devant la quantité de projets et de tâches que nous
devons gérer dans notre petite « ferme ». Ils ont proposé de venir
pendant deux semaines au début du printemps avec leur fils Max, demandant
simplement que nous leur fournissions une liste de travaux ! Paul et Max
sont tous les deux des charpentiers/menuisiers experts. Je leur ai donc envoyé
les dessins d'Andrew.

A few weeks later, they
arrived in a rather battle-weary Transit van, with a pile of planed up timber.
Ledged and braced, morticed and tenoned, glued and screwed, these doors are
made to last. They were then covered with primer, undercoat and gloss by
Madeleine (an artist, so overqualified for this sort of painting). Hanging them
was a challenge, especially as we came, only then, to realise that the metal
bars set into the walls and oak lintel weren’t level with each other or
horizontal. It was entertaining trying to hold these heavy doors in place while
trying to trim them to hang millimetre-perfect.

In theory, I said! In
fact, the path trodden by Gabrielle and me in our efforts to learn French is
strewn with hilarious, embarrassing and sometimes downright rude gaffes.
Pitfalls and pratfalls await the eager language student who slightly
mispronounces something—such as the subtle difference between dessus
(above) and dessous (below)—or, in this Spanish example, misses out a
couple of those strange accents the continentals love so much: